With the development of a third-generation mobile communication system (3G) and a fourth-generation mobile communication system (4G), a user equipment (UE), such as a mobile phone or a tablet computer, can receive and decode a video or audio stream in real time. However, compared with a traditional wired communication network, a channel in wireless communication sharply changes in real time, which causes a fluctuation in real-time streaming media transmission and further affects video viewing quality or audio listening quality of a user.
To adapt to a streaming media transmission mechanism in a mobile communication environment, the prior art provides a Dynamic Adaptive Steaming over HTTP (DASH) technology, thereby ensuring fluency of a UE in receiving streaming media. The DASH technology is a streaming media transmission technology over HTTP and can effectively adapt to a change of a radio channel. It is ensured that even in a poor radio channel environment, a mobile terminal is provided with continuous and uninterrupted streaming media access experience by constantly switching between multiple bit rate versions of same content, that is, selecting a different segment from a representation corresponding to a different channel condition.
In a process of implementing the foregoing data transmission, because a UE that supports the DASH technology and a streaming media server that supports the DASH technology need to jointly participate in a DASH data transmission process, if the UE cannot support the DASH technology, a representation that matches a current channel condition and a segment in the representation cannot be selected according to an MPD file, which causes a playback failure; and if the streaming media server cannot support the DASH technology or the streaming media server does not store a DASH streaming media file corresponding to the DASH technology, the streaming media server sends a streaming media file to the UE when receiving a streaming media file request sent by the UE and then cannot provide the UE with streaming media data whose bit rate matches the current channel condition of the UE, and a problem of streaming media playback interruption occurs when the channel condition is poor. Therefore, there is a lack of a technical solution that can implement DASH communication when the UE or the streaming media server cannot support the DASH technology.